


Calibrate

by witchsoup



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, F/M, Fluff and Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-10
Updated: 2017-01-11
Packaged: 2018-09-16 17:06:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9281528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/witchsoup/pseuds/witchsoup
Summary: It’s not like he’s more qualified than any of his classmates, just that the head of the School is an old friend of his father’s, listed as Henry in Lucius’ Blackberry although his given name is John. A nickname earned at the age of seventeen when they first found themselves at the end of a line of coke. Like the hoover. Get it?





	1. Rocket Science

**Author's Note:**

> Blame this on a Mitchell and Webb sketch, and the fact there are so many amazing college AU's out there, but not as many university AU's - expect Brit specific references. First published fic in this fandom, though I was previously active elsewhere.

If she scoffs any louder there's an eager-looking Computer Scientist by the archway who's bound to attempt the Heimlich maneuver.

It's after four. They’ve been huddling by electric heaters under this marquee since half ten. It’s been bucketing down since quarter to eleven. The Neuroscience table hasn't seen a single interested face in forty minutes, whereas _he's_ had a second year lackey on leaflet runs every hour since applicants started arriving. He's dressed all in black - on him black is timeless, it's _classic, Blaise_ \- his only ornamentation the metallic silver sharpie on a chain around his neck. From what he can tell it offends her that he came prepared.

Draco turned eighteen in the middle of a heat wave; the photo Pansy put on her instagram _without his permission_ saw him gain half a million twitter followers in a week. Stripped from the waist up, halfway out of his race suit, he's fairly sure the photo of Lucius Malfoy's exalted progeny - flushed and grinning beside Ferrari's latest effort - is still on the Nurburgring website.

The Fansies - trademark - went into frenzy. Teen Vogue did a spread with Pansy draped in rolls of film and spring flowers, featured artful photos of the three of them in their _little student flat,_ unquote, decorated in its entirety by Pansy and purchased for a sum that she refuses to disclose. Pansy doesn’t wear anything without a fashion house name stitched carefully, beautifully, onto the label, but she’s got to remain relatable.

Whichever haggard looking postgrad in a ubiquitous black fleece he was supposed to be working with had disappeared under the pretense of retrieving Dominoes - Pizza Hut is closer but their dips are really, truly, very shit - shortly after she arrived at the stand. Draco hasn't been asked a single question about his course all day: presumably she didn't fancy herding seventeen year old girls into an orderly queue while they vie for a selfie, ask him around a nervous giggle if he dyes his hair, if he’ll tell Pansy she saved my life, like, literally, I swear.

It’s not like he’s more qualified than any of his classmates, just that the head of the School is an old friend of his father’s, listed as Henry in Lucius’ Blackberry although his given name is John. A nickname earned at the age of seventeen when they first found themselves at the end of a line of coke. Like the hoover. Get it?

When five o'clock rolls around the sky remains resolutely grey. The rain has finally scaled back to a half-hearted drizzle; the grass behind the marquee is waterlogged and muddy; the flagstones are stained dark grey and spotted with puddles.

Neuroscience girl is doing her best not to shiver in a half sodden maroon hoodie - he knows they’re not cheap, not in terms most students would understand, emblazoned with School of Life Sciences and the university crest, he also knows they’re ugly as sin - and a pair of skinny jeans that are doing wonders for her arse.

She's small, at least half a foot shorter than Draco, with a riot of brown curls and dark eyes, a pair of full lips on a face full of delicate features, skin a warm brown that makes him think they’d make an attractive pair. He’s also fairly sure she's English, based on what he could hear of her accent while explaining to applicants that no, you can't perform brain surgery with a Neuroscience degree. They just wanted a promotional water bottle.

"If you step on the quadrangle, they won't let you graduate," he calls to Neuroscience girl, who has resignedly packed up her stack of booklets. She's about to commit a crime by university standards: somewhere above phones ringing in an exam, but below plagiarism.

"Pardon?"

She looks back over her shoulder with an expression of contempt - disgusted confusion.

"And your shoes - they’ll get wet."

His eyes flick to her feet, clad in some clumpy laced monstrosities with a sole about as thick as her wrist; mainland Britain could be wholly submerged and her feet would likely still be dry.

"That's not a rule. It's a superstition. You know, more effective than a 'keep off the grass' sign."

He reaches a hand over the chair which holds his laptop bag and a half-eaten McDonald’s delivered by Blaise on his way to a Dynamics lecture. One of the many girls - a woman, really, not old enough to be a mature student but certainly not a bright-eyed Fresher with a fake learner licence burning a hole in her pocket - had left a purple lipstick mark on the straw of his strawberry milkshake. After that it was a lost cause: he’s not an idiot, he doesn’t share drinks with strangers. Just because he fancied Uma Thurman as Poison Ivy when he was ten doesn’t mean he wasn’t wary of her toxic kisses.

"I'm Draco," he offers - she eyes his hand in a way that suggests he’s contagious. "Fourth year, Aerospace."

"Hermione. Second year."

Shuffling the box of pamphlets to her left and setting them back on the table, she shakes his proffered hand.

"It’s a bit shit, sticking you over here with STEM instead of with the other Life Science stands-"

Her eyes snap up, eyebrows down and expression stormy.

"Oh I'm sorry, I didn't realise Neuroscience doesn't _qualify_ \- I’m sure you could have done with more room for your little fan club, but god forbid they put you beside a girl's subject."

She's flushed, turns away, starts snapping folding chairs over with more force than is really necessary.

"I just meant-"

"You think you're so special with your boys club in your _ugly_ building, swapping stories about how much you loved Lego and model planes as a child.” Her face contorts, and she glares at him, a challenge that begs him to correct her - begs him to dig himself deeper into a rather cavernous hole.

“I wasn’t allowed Lego, it was- a choking hazard, I think my mother said. Didn’t trust the staff not to let me swallow it.”

Her eyes widen at the word staff; Draco’s fairly certain he’s about to receive a lecture on Marx’s theory of alienation.

“Jesus. Ok, so you - you want to be a pilot, but mummy and daddy think commercial airlines are uncouth. So you're frittering away five years on a degree you _won't use_ before they give in and make a call to get you a job at BA. Sound about right?"

Her hands, pink from the cold, have been forcefully removed from the pockets of her hoodie - one is on her hip while the other gestures violently by her head.

"It was going to be Air France, actually. Father owns shares. But I’m no longer cleared to fly, I'm afraid.” He manages to conjure half a smirk.

He shrugs on a silk bomber over his jumper, nonchalant as possible - he knows it looks good, but that’s just not going to help him here. Cleared makes it sound like he's minus a rubber stamp from his GP, colour blindness or epilepsy or something else out of his hands when in reality he can't get in the thing without smelling smoke, a phantom heat on his skin from a remembered blast.

Three years since Crabbe died and the quiet, calm voice of his father telling him that the instructor suffered an aneurysm. Dropped out of the sky like a stone. They managed to find enough of Vince to warrant a coffin.

She ignores him, asks: "Why did they let you on the stand anyway? You didn't take it seriously at all - I was listening, you didn't say a word about your precious planes all day - you just signed autographs, what kind of pretentious-”

Thrusting a glossy leaflet into her hand, he jerks his chin, motions for her to look down at the smiling faces of Margaret Hamilton and Grace Hopper. The first page is a short biography of Ada Lovelace; the second holds a number of statistics about demographics in the field. 

"Every one of those girls walked away with a signed copy. They won't throw it out in a hurry."

Gazing up at him, pink cheeked, curls framing her face, her mouth forms the word 'Oh.'

It is at that moment his phone decides to go off - the girl - Hermione - frowns, seemingly humiliated, once more picks up her bag and makes as if to walk away.

"Wait. One second," he blurts, scanning a message from Blaise. "Do you- um, do you like curry?"


	2. Brain Surgery

The clamour of the dinner crowd in the local Wetherspoons has Blaise propped up against a gaudy faux-marble pillar, clutching his forehead, reflective Ray Bans glinting in the light of the rather offensive chandeliers. He resents the term _drama queen._ Much in the same way he’d wrangled Greg into not slinging ‘poof’ around like dirt - at least three years before the great Cassius Warrington revelation of 2012 - they’d simply shut up with something of a smirk, at least on Draco’s part.

Thursdays mean that over the course of the night the bar staff will serve about half of every sports team on campus, plus some of the rowdier business students Draco is happy to ignore on the rare occasion they slur his name across the room.

The dangers of public school and Russell group universities.

Thursdays mean curry, enough carbs to soak up a swimming pool’s worth of Jägerbombs. For Blaise, it inevitably means nursing the hangover borne of too many free shots acquired the night before over the sound of Britney’s _Work Bitch._ When Daphne’s up from London and Theo drags himself away from his beloved Hong Kong, they can usually manage to get him to his morning classes.

Staring holes into the side of Hermione’s head, Pansy facetimes Daphne at full volume, while the blonde sits in hair and makeup waiting for the big ticket models to relinquish the camera. Propped on the table by an expensive looking contraption sits Pansy's vlog camera, pointed straight at Hermione’s face, cataloguing every uncomfortable glance towards its unblinking glass eye.

“So, _Hermione,_ where did you go to school?”

Draco shoots Pansy a warning look, but she smiles sweetly over her sparkling cider while Daphne, cradled in Pansy’s palm, waves brightly from the small screen.

“Edinburgh. I have family there.”

“Anywhere I’d have heard of? Of course you must know Draco’s family have been at Eton for how long is it, darling?”

“Four generations,” he grinds out around a grimace.

Girls dressed like that generally aren’t impressed by his accent, or the fact his mother shares cousins with the Windsors.

Hermione directs her answer to him, turning almost imperceptibly away from Pansy.

“It’s quite small. I lived with my great-aunt Minerva most of the time. She’s been headmistress of a number of schools in deprived areas, and my parents thought she’d be much better at guiding me through exams than they could ever be. Dentists, very busy-”

“Why Neuroscience? Rejected from medicine, I assume, most of them are.”

Again, Hermione’s brow furrows at Pansy's interruption, though she presses on.

“They knew if I had any hope of getting into the best Neuroscience program in the country I’d have to work hard. Why Aerospace?”

Pansy looks disgruntled, and irritation flashes across her face as she turns her phone away from Draco, only then realising Daphne had long since hung up. Draco looks bashful, something he’s been told several times by a very drunk Pansy makes him look _adorbs._

“I love flying,” he offers. “As soon as I was old enough to understand what a plane was I started pestering my father for a go in the cockpit. I wanted to train to be a commercial pilot straight out of school, but… my father decided that since one day I’ll be taking over his business I’d better learn how to crunch numbers first.”

He shoots her a half smile, takes a sip of warm beer.

“All the better to count your millions with, my dear,” mumbles Blaise from the circle of his arms, forehead pressed to the sticky table. Pansy slides a napkin towards him, which he promptly cushions his head upon.

“Heir to a pharmaceutical giant, but instead of using his powers to find the cure for hangovers _he_ pisses about doing sums.”

It looks, finally, as if Hermione might crack a genuine smile. It had taken them half an hour to dismantle the banners around Draco’s stand, never mind the fact they’d gone up in less than a minute. Offloading most of his props on the postgrad who resurfaced at five on the dot, he offered to walk her back to her building to deposit what turned out to be six full boxes of literature on her chosen subject.

They ended up taking a taxi.

When she’d tried to wriggle away with an awkward goodbye and no mention of a phone number he’d pulled out his best plaintive tone and informed her she at least deserved a drink after six hours of wrangling applicants. That she owed him for paying for their taxi ride.

For that comment he’d received a sharp jab to the arm and the first four seconds on what he was sure would have been a riveting speech on third wave feminism.

Instead he had covered her mouth with his hand. He knew he hadn’t imagined the hitch in her breath, or the blush that crept up from her neck when he had whispered _‘please’_ in her ear.

On the walk to Blaise’s chosen shithole she had explained, rather _passionately,_ that silencing women in such a manner was unacceptable - and honestly, who knew where his hands had been. He found himself, though he truly did his best to listen, charmed by the way her hair bounced and curled around her face as she gesticulated, gathering raindrops.

Now she listens - with every outward sign of interest - to Pansy’s recital of her social media schedule. He finds himself interested less in the importance of daily vlogging and more in the curve of Hermione’s neck, where it meets her cheek propped up on one delicate, unreservedly unmanicured hand.

He rejoins the conversation just in time to see Pansy’s horrified expression as Hermione asks who exactly she is.

In the space of a moment his view, a vignette of a girl like Hermione Granger in a place like this, surrounded by his awful, wonderful friends, is shattered.

Shattered as she turns, eyes wide and filled with dread, to the shouts of a man in a kilt.

“Minnie! Minnie! I didn’t know you studied _here,_ what happened to ‘if Edinburgh was good enough for Charles Darwin it’s good enough for me,” exclaims the man, pausing only to take a long pull of his beer, pulling her into a hug before unashamedly giving her the once over.

Propping one hand on the pillar by Blaise’s head, he turns once more to Hermione, who smiles weakly at him.

“Cormac, it’s been… too long. What brings you down from St. Andrews?”

“Stag do! Ernie Macmillan’s getting married, if you can believe that - he’s a bit better looking now he’s lost the weight, but I mean his bird’s nothing special either so I suppose that makes sense-”

“Cormac, these are my- my friends, they study here too,” she bleats, sending a pleading look Draco’s way. “That’s Blaise, Pansy, and this is-”

“Her boyfriend. Draco Malfoy, pleased to meet you,” interrupts Draco, ignoring the look of outrage that flits across Hermione’s face, smoothly rising from his seat and offering a handshake to… _Cormac._

“Cormac McLaggen, although I’m sure Minnie’s told you all about me-”

“I can’t say she has, actually.” Draco’s smile is cold as he moves to sling an arm around Hermione’s still-wet shoulders.

At that, McLaggen seems to take a half-step back, grin faltering. He gestures with both thumbs to the back of his t-shirt, which reads ‘MCSHAGGEN.’

“I was Minnie’s first love, though of course I didn’t know it at the time - never noticed her, even with her hand permanently thrown in the air. Can’t feel too bad though, she was barely half my height, easy to miss.”

At that, he chuckles, and Hermione forces out a weak laugh.

“Smartest twelve year old I’ve ever met in my life - there was this one time, must have been GCSE Maths, right?” Hermione nods sharply, braced for the story to come. “The invigilator wouldn’t let her in the room! Delayed the whole thing by at least half an hour, we got to sneak a look at the paper, remember that?”

Hermione merely grimaces at Draco’s raised eyebrow.

“Why wouldn’t they let you into the exam, _Minnie?”_

Cormac laughs, then a wide smile forms at the confused look on Draco’s face.

“Christ, she’s not usually this modest, not Dalmeny’s little know-it-all! She was our little Minnie mascot! Took her exams what was it, three years early? Trounced everyone else in our year, of course,” he scoffs. “Then she ran off to go and do brain surgery and hasn't been heard from since.”

Abruptly Hermione springs into movement, rushing around the table to grab her sodden jacket.

“Cormac it was lovely seeing you again, really, but I must be going.”

“But wait, Granger, add me on facebook or something, would you?”

Cormac practically throws his beer down on the table, turning to grab his phone from where it’s wedged into his belt.

By the time he looks up, Hermione is weaving her way through the crowd. As frustration clouds his face, Draco simply shrugs, calling ‘nice to meet you,’ over his shoulder as he rushes to follow her out, down two flights of stairs, past a group of shivering young women clutching cigarettes by the door.

On the street, he splashes his way to the bus shelter where she stands hunched, furiously trying to zip up her coat. When he calls her name and she looks up, her face shifts from irate to embarrassed.

“His girlfriend bullied me mercilessly all through high school, and he never lifted a finger to stop it. The last time I saw him was at a flat party in St Andrews. He made a pass at me, then threw up on my shoes,” she sighs. “He’s only there for the golf, thinks he’s the next Tiger Woods. Bit of an idiot, really. Never bothered to learn my _actual name.”_

When he simply smirks at her, she immediately frowns, snapping, “What?”

“Dalmeny house,” he offers, to which her only response is a violent blush.

“Don’t look at me like that, you went to _Eton.”_

“Don’t you look at me like that, you went to _Fettes.”_

She only scowls, looking over his shoulder for a bus that isn’t coming.

“You said you were a second year.”

Her shoulders go up, as if to shield her from his words.

“I am. Just not in Neuroscience. I’m a medical student.”

“So why were you handing out leaflets for Neuroscience?”

She looks away, head half bowed and eyes shifting.

“Medicine wouldn’t take me at the age I was, told me I couldn’t deal with the practical work yet. They knew I wanted to do neurosurgery, suggested I spend my time _productively._ Honestly, I just think they wanted to double the tuition fees.”

Draco is silent for a moment, taking in her wide eyes and the defiant set of her mouth, and promptly doubles up with laughter.

“Oh alright, laugh at the freak. I got enough of that at school, I assure you it’s nothing new,” she spits, turning to stomp off in her ugly shoes.

“Wait, no- Hermione, wait!”

His shoes - Tom Ford, suede - are already ruined as he braves the rain once more to grab her arm. She’s braced for humiliation, but he simply grins.

“Brain surgery, I mean, it’s hardly rocket science.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This whole thing was written for the purposes of that joke, and it's not even mine. Forgive me.


End file.
